Math Curriculum

How we bring learning to life:

Our vision

Urbandale Schools will bring mathematics learning to life for every student by creating a collaborative math community where productive struggle is encouraged to build deep mathematical understanding.

Our mindsets…

Students learn and develop understanding of concepts and procedures through exploring and solving contextual and mathematical problems, reasoning, and discourse.

Students build procedural fluency from conceptual understanding.

Number sense routines and fluency work should be engaging and are an essential part of math instruction every day.

All students should have access to grade-level mathematics content centered on learning mathematics with understanding, actively building new knowledge from their prior knowledge and experiences.

All students need to have a range of strategies and approaches from which to choose in solving problems, including, but not limited to, general methods, standard algorithms, and procedures.

The role of the student is to be actively involved in making sense of mathematics tasks by using varied strategies and representations, justifying solutions, making connections to prior knowledge or familiar contexts and experiences, and considering the reasoning and perspective of others.

Effective teachers have an understanding of the progression of math concepts and their coherence within and across grade levels.

Effective teachers focus goals on major work of the grade and link additional and supporting topics to the major work.

The role of the teacher is to create a supportive and collaborative math community, in which they engage students in rich tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving and facilitate discourse that moves students toward shared understanding of mathematics.

Effective teachers provide students with appropriate challenge, encourage perseverance in solving problems, and support productive struggle in learning mathematics.

Effective teachers encourage understanding from a variety of perspectives to enhance connections between math concepts and real-world context.

High-Quality Instructional Materials

Urbandale Community Schools is committed to providing our students high-quality standards-aligned instructional materials. The central approach to teaching mathematics is problem-based using the following materials

Preschool: Origo Stepping Stones

Kindergarten-Algebra II: Illustrative Mathematics

Learn More about PreK-12 Math Instruction

Math Acceleration

Students at the end of 5th and 6th grade are recommended for math acceleration. Urbandale Community Schools’ approach to math acceleration is curriculum telescoping. Curriculum telescoping is when a student is able to accelerate through a subject’s curriculum completing more than a year’s worth of instruction during an instructional year.